LETTER FROM HONG KONG

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A few years ago, Deng Xiaoping, China's Senior Leader, dismissed as "absolute rubbish" suggestions by lesser Chinese officials that the People's Liberation Army might not be stationing troops here after 1997. Last January, Deng came out of his nominal retirement and made an inspection of communities lining the Pearl River estuary, which estends about sixty miles south from the provincial capital, Guangzhou (Canton) to Hong Kong, on the east bank, and Macao, a Portuguese-administered territory, on the west bank. To the Chinese Communist leadership, this capitalist region must see counterrevolutionary. Deng came out in defence of the zones and the free-market reforms that former Premier and general secretary Zhao Ziyang instituted throughout the country before 1989, under the slogan "Socialism withChinese characteristics." Deng, physically enfeebled, at 87, and theoretically a private citizen, summoned China's President, "Yang Shangkun, and other national leaders from Beijing to share his vision: he had seen China's future in the province and it worked. In another twenty years, he told them, Guangdong would become Asia's "Fifth Small Dragon. He also warned pointedly that "China must be on guard against the right. Yet its main task is to counter the left, "and said that leaders standing in the way of extending for a hundred years the free-market reforms pioneered in the Special Economic Zones "must depart the stage." He took the extraordinary step of going outside the government for support.